George B. Wasson on Erlandson
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
., THE COQUILLE INDIANS AND THE • CULTURAL "BLACK HOLE" OF THE SOUTHWFST OREGON COAST By George B. Wasson .. A paper submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Master of Science degree in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. on Erlandson, Advisor December 1,1994 UNIVff:SlTY cor crF'?CN UBRARY tjhU~0N WGthi:l 2 PROLOGUE The Coquille people have lived so many generations in their homeland environment and traditional hunting-gathering .. territories, the years have become too many to count. As is true with other southern Oregon coastal people, the oldest stories ofthe Coquelle (the original name) tell about the creation of the world and its rearrangement to suit the needs of the People who were to come later. Mythical beings such as Talapus (Old Man Coyote) told how the land was builtfrom blue clay scooped from under the water and how that land was protected from wave action by lining the shores with woven mats and basketry. The old stories relate first-hand accounts of the great floods and fires that repeatedly swept over the land from the west, often changing the geography significantly while scattering people and other animals far and wide (Wasson 1991). .. 3 The Cultural "BLACK HOLE" of the Southern Oregon Coast Because of the short time span from the beginning of everyday White contact among the native peoples of the southern Oregon coast, until the demise of their cultural, spiritual, and physical integrity, very little knowledge through scientific research was collected and preserved for .. posterity. In 1931 T.T. Waterman wrote, "A number of ethnologists worked in this region [Southern Oregon coast], prior to the writer's advent ... , but relatively little concerning these groups has found its way into print" (Waterman 1931: 6). Due to the thorough destruction of the villages, the people and their life-ways, only bits and pieces of their culture and languages survived after what might be understood as the "Oregon Holocaust." From this perspective, I have adopted the concept of a cultural or ethnological "BLACK HOLE" as a descriptive term for that area of Southern Oregon, where the surviving descendants "retain only a few relics of their indigenous culture" (Barnett 1954). My approach to rediscovering and understanding the cultural contents of that "Black Hole" is to examine those characteristics of neighboring tribes for whom there is fairly adequate information and draw parallel inferences about the lost information. The Coquilles are a group from that "Black Hole," and I propose to look at the "bits and pieces" of SUrviving knowledge about them in an effort to reconstruct (as adequately as feasible) their lost and forgotten cultural heritage. • 4 Coos Bay and the Coquille People .. -....._....... COOUILLE • 0 KM S l' N 0, 1 2 OREGON MILES Map 1. The Coquille Area------~ (Hall 1984: 3). to. 5 COQUILLE CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY For purposes of sociocultural identification, Coquille Indian tribal members are directly descended from people of the following geographical locations: villages at South Slough and Coos Bay, villages along the Coquille River, and coastal villages as far south as the Sixes River (Map 1). Due to inter-tribal marriages, many members are also related to Umpqua, Coos, Siuslaw, Tututni, Shasta Costa, Chetco, Tolowa, or other American Indian tribes. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the common spelling was Coquelle (Zenk 1990: 579), pronounced Ko-Kwel' as in tribal use today. When Land Claims hearings were conducted in the 1930s and 1940s, the Coos (including many Coquilles), Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw appealed as a confederated group. The Court of Claims denied their appeal due to lack of evidence. The land claims for the "Coos" had been based on the testimonies of the oldest Indians alive at that time. George Bundy Wasson thought there could be no better evidence of aboriginal sovereignty and territorial occupation than the words of the old people themselves. The federal government declared their testimony to be merely hearsay. However, after collecting ethnographic information from the old Indians of that area, John P. Harrington stated that the Coquilles were undoubtedly the true descendants of the aboriginal occupants of their land, hence the land claims settlement for the Coquilles. This decision caused a split between the Coos and Coquilles which ultimately resulted in separate federally recognized tribes. For land claims paYment purposes, the Coquille tribal area was defined in the 1940s as bounded along the Oregon Coast from approximately Floras Creek on the south to a point of rocks by Whiskey Run Creek north of the mouth of the Coquille River. From each of these 6 .. coastal points, the north and south boundaries extended easterly to join the north and south ends of an eastern boundaty line which ran along the crest of the Coast Range of Mountains. This territory encompasses all of the land, soil, plant; and animal types available in Western Oregon. There are high prairies and coastal mountain meadows containing lush grasses for sustaining large populations of Roosevelt Elk and Black-tailed Deer. Valleys were loaded with roots and bulbs for annual harvests, while the rivers and streams extending to the ocean produced abundant fish, eels, shellfish and sea mammals. Their forests provided the rare Port Orford Cedar for carving canoes and Western Red Cedar for plank houses. It also Yielded the widest variety of basketry materials available anywhere along the West Coast. The antiquity of occupation in the Coquille territory has been established by archaeological investigations and amateur discoveries at . Camas Valley on the Upper Coquille River drainage. The discovery of a Clovis-type point in Camas Valley (Wallmann 1994; Erlandson and Moss 1994), made from chert indigenous to that specific area, dates human occupation of the Upper Coquille territory to as much as 11,500 years before present, (B.P.). Archaeological research on the Southern Oregon coast has revealed occupation dates as early as 8,200 years B. P. at the "Indian Sands" site in Curry County, just south of the Coquille territory (Erlandson and Moss 1994). At the Standley site in Camas Valley, obsidian hydration evidence indicates that occupation may have begun between 4,500 and 5,000 years ago. Additionally there were fragments of clay figurines discovered there, which have been known to date between 1,100 - 400 years ago (Connolly 1991: 1). 7 EARLY WHITE CONTACT In 1792, Capt. George Vancouver, while exploring along the Northwest Coast, anchored his ship somewhere between Cape Blanco and Port Orford. According to Beckham (1977:102): ... The fine handwriting of Dr. Archibald Menzies, now hidden away in a large journal in the British Museum in London, tells about one of those encounters [between early sailors and Indians] .... In the spring of 1792, Captain George Vancouver brought his expedition to Cape Blanco on the southern Oregon coast. Menzies, the surgeon and botanist, became very interested in the Indians who paddled out in their canoes. He wrote: 'they were ofa middling size with mild pleasing features & nowise sullen or distrustful in their behaviour, they were ofa copper colour but cleanly, as we obseIVed no vestige ofgreasypaint or ochre about their faces oramong theirhair. .. r Further descriptions state that the people were n tolerably well limbed and preferred cleanliness ofbody to tattoos." Twenty-five years later, the fur trader Peter Corney sailed along this same section of the coast. Observing many villages along the shore, he sailed in close and also met some of the Tututni Indians. He noted: About noon, several canoes came offwithin hail ofthe ship; we waved to them to come closer, which they did, displaying green boughs and bunches ofwhite feathers; they stopped paddling, and one man, whom we took to be the chief, stood up, and made a long speech, which we did not understand. We then waved a white flag, and they immediatelypulled for the ship singing all the way. ... They also brought some berries, fish, and handsome baskets for sale. These men were tall and well formed, theirgarment made ofdressed deerskins, with a small round hat, in the shape ofa basin, that fitted close round the head; none ofthe women made their appearance (Beckham 1977: 103). • 8 • Early in the nineteenth century, white explorers, trappers, and missionaries came to the Pacific Northwest, and especially to the places now called Oregon. By the mid-1800s, most of the West coast was well populated with white miners and settlers. However, that central portion of the Oregon coast that was nearly inaccessible by overland routes because of the rugged Coast Range mountains, and also relatively obscure from the ocean, was not much affected by the white influx until the 1850s. Diseases of European origin (gonorrhea, syphilis, measles and smallpox) had drastically reduced the populations along the Northwest coast since the late 1700s and early 1800s (Drucker 1965). Between 1829 and 1832, "the fevers" had swept along the Columbia River, up the Willamette Valley and on over to the Rogue River Valley, and had jumped across to the Sacramento Valley, killing up to 90% of the village inhabitants in some places (Beckham 1971). Archaeological and ethnohistorical information indicate that the people of the Southern Oregon coast were not spared from those devastations, and an equally high percentage of their populations were wiped out in the same manner about the same time. It is interesting to note that an early explorer traveling up the Coquille River reported seeing hundreds of Indians working on the fish weirs (Chase 1873), while a few years later, the same area was described as having only a few workers in those locations. Historian Orvil Dodge provided a sample of early attitudes toward the local Indians in his 1898 book Pioneer History of Coos & Curry Counties.